Silvia López

Xavier Martínez

Javier Toret

Nuria Rodríguez (translation)

languages

transversal

Contemporary
capitalism within the European territory is defined by a new diagram of
exploitation and control that places a redefinition of the capital-labour
relationship at the centre of productive relationships. A redefinition of ways
of working and living.

Life is no
longer everything that remains when you don't count wage-labour. Emotional
capacity, linguistic skill, all kinds of knowledge and opinions, the body and
sexualities have become a productive matrix. What does this mean for social
movements and struggles? Firstly, it means that life itself has become a
battlefield, an arena for conflict and invention, not just exploitation.
Secondly, the emergence of new strata in forms of contemporary living labour
requires new forms of organisation and new policies that accommodate existing
social subjectivities.

In this
brief article we will outline a few ideas on a possible subjective
recomposition, made up of differences and new challenges, which tries to think
and act from inside the multiple processes of reorganisation against precarity.
Militant research notes in the light of experiences in Spain that show us the
need to invent new organisational machines – machines for living and for
fighting that are up to the challenge of the complexity of our times.

1.1.
When reality is smashed to pieces: identifying, recomposing and inventing new
rights

The
precarisation of existence – no longer just as a social trend, but as a savage
and irreversible inscription on the social body – implies that we are living in
a reality that has been smashed to pieces. Fragmentation, isolation and
solitude, savage individualism, the unending cycle of production, reproduction
and consumption[1],
the toughening of internal and external borders, the empire of
security-paranoia, the new forms of control that destroy social connectivity
and are directly opposed to a care-based logic, the removal of a life always
ready for capital and mistaken for reality - all these inevitabilities are now
the baseline of our lives and touch all aspects of our experience. In this sense,
politics based on alliances no longer works (at least not on its own): we have
to reinvent it. From now on, the aim won’t be to bring together groups or
realities that are “working on the same thing”, or to create networks and open
up new shared spaces (though this is important too), but to reconstruct
scattered and horribly disconnected experiences.

One of the
challenges in this task will be to avoid starting from the usual ideological
categories of the left, even the least orthodox left, which has often generated
abstract, self-satisfied islands and clearings for what is supposedly
interesting or “really” political: we have to start from particular experiences
that have nothing or little to do with ideology and carefully identify the
resistance and unrest that are already appearing in the social. We also have to
question the excessively homogenous make-up of movements and models of activism
that have a specific kind of subjectivity (young, without dependents, able to
make do with very little, free from illness, etc,). There is an imperative need
to formulate rights based on shared experiences in this open, fragmented and
scattered context that disconnects and distances people’s realities if we are
to empower and recompose an expropriated subjectivity.

The
collective EuroMayDay[2]
process tried to amplify the resonance and the shared work that was being done
around creating new imaginaries and languages to do with precarity by
configuring different recombinations among trade unions, social movements and individuals
that were beginning to call themselves precarious. It was an important step in
extending the scope of these issues. The EuroMayDay process on it’s own
obviously couldn’t offer the physical anchor that movements need, but in many
cases it did help – with a lot of limitations – to assert a focus of
subjectivation, research and self-organisation within the confusion and
dispersion of the movements and contemporary life.

Meanwhile,
there are there Oficinas de Derechos Sociales (ODS, Offices for Social Rights),
which attempt – each with its own peculiarities – to create a new form social
syndicalism or biosyndicalism against precarity[3],
through practices that are the direct heirs to the legacy of the political
practices of the 90s. They merge with the global movement and combine many of
its elements, but they also surface in response to some of the abovementioned
limits in terms of composition and forms of organisation, and to the limits
arising from the major change that has taken place in the subjectivity paradigm
and in the social situation.

To
identify, investigate, recompose, enunciate, communicate, listen and invent
rights[4]
, these are some of the practices that emerge and grow in a totally precarised
world and some of the principal concerns of the ODSs, which have abandoned the
assumptions of more traditional forms of politics that know exactly where they
come from and where they are heading, in favour of experimenting and
investigating with new forms of organisation. They provide advice on legal and
social issues, create spaces for education and training, impart Spanish classes
where migrants can learn and gather, distribute guides that set out basic
rights and tricks, carry out actions and interventions in response to rights
violations, form new paths shared by precarious locals and migrants, invent new
combinations between trade unions and precarious movements and accompany the
processes initiated by others who rebel against specific issues or situations
of unfairness.

We will
briefly discuss three issues that have been of interest to the ODSs and that
present new challenges for organisation and analysis: (a) the issue of care as
a radical feminist criticism of a society organised on the basis of market
interest rather than people’s interests; (b) the flagrant problem of housing,
which has spontaneously mobilised thousands of people over that last year and a
half all over Spain, contributing original, creative and innovative elements to
the act of going out on the streets and political expression; and (c) the joint
organisation of migrants and locals, which is breaking down subjective borders
and establishing networks, as well as contact with some minority unions that
are displacing more traditional forms of labour struggles and replacing them with
a biosyndicalism or social syndicalism capable of taking the battle to areas
beyond the issue of precarious employment: care, housing, migration and
minority unions are some elements that make up a possible map of conflicts,
challenges and alliances.

2. Some
lines for reflection and action

2.1.
Reorganising care

What does
it mean to talk about care today, from the perspective of official policies and
reforms or that of individual or organised groups of women who rebel against
the conditions under which care is provided, and against who is expected to
provide care? This is an essential question. It is related to precarity and
migration, to increasingly rigid but subtle forms of new stratifications of the
sex-gender system, to new forms of production in which life is the raw material
for capital, to the way life is managed, ordered and controlled, to its
(invisible and precarised) circuits of maintenance (who takes care of life)
and, therefore, to the possibilities of inventing other forms of social organisation
that are transformational and combative with the new forms of exploitation that
are having devastating effects, especially for women. It is also a question of
new feminist practices that will able to respond to these new issues, as they
have in fact started to do, in unexpected ways and compositions[5].

The “care
crisis” phenomenon [6]
describes the tension between an organisational model that women have had
enough of (enough of this imposed fate as mothers and carers in charge of the
wellbeing of others) and the resulting vacuum, and the discussion about who
will be responsible for providing this care now, and how they will go about
providing it[7].
Asking ourselves who will look after us and everybody else means reconsidering
and questioning the current organisational model, in which women basically
become responsible for care through the sexual contract[8],
as well as the gender-based and international division of labour. It also means
questioning the sustainability of a society based on the interests of companies
rather than people, that is, organised under the logic of profit rather than
care. And it means remembering that life is inseparable from illness, care,
health, death, others and the body. Life is far from aseptic, white, divine and
independent: life is also the positive extreme from which to start. Any
organisational model that tries to detach itself from this, from the material
nature of life and bodies, and to go against the needs of people cannot but be
a source of malaise, frustration and anxiety: a life that tries to be anything
other than life becomes unliveable.

The issues
of the conditions under which care is currently provided (invisibility, lack of
rights, income and value), and of who is doing the caring (live-in housekeepers
without papers, casual subcontracted workers, the superprecarious, women with
dependents) are intimately linked to the precarisation of existence for women,
and directly related to migratory processes and global care chains[9].
Rather than talking about the end of the subordination of women and the
rhetoric of our gender equality achievements, we should be talking about a
reorganisation of the patriarchy.

In November
2006, a large number of women met in Madrid to talk about these issues: on
March 8 2007 they took to the streets with the slogan “In favour of the social
reorganisation of care”. The fundamental challenges for today’s feminist
practices and the fight against the precarisation of living conditions are tied
up with the need to reconsider the implications and effects of this slogan,
invent others that express these processes and create alliances with women
migrants.

2.2. No
tendrás casa en la puta vida

The
"Right to Decent Housing" campaign offered a key opportunity to think
about reterritorialisation in terms of precarity and problems related to
everyday life. Under the slogan "No vas a tener casa en la puta vida"
("you won't have a house in your bloody life"), it managed to place
this fundamental right in the frontline of public debate, as well as revealing
property-related violence, the destruction of the territory and the
reorganisation of cities for the benefit of capital in the post-Fordist era.

Two
milestones mark the start of the furious-paced process of property speculation
that Spain has been subject to over the last twenty years. The first was the
enactment of mortgage market legislation as part of the 1977 Moncloa Pacts, and
the second was the enactment of the Boyer Decree (Royal Decree-Law 2/1985). The
first set the bases that made mortgages a potentially appetizing business for
financial entities. The second was the starting gun for the race to harass and
bring down tenants[10].

Through an
anonymous announcement not affiliated to any organisation, association or party
and spread through the net[11],
this urgent problem brought together thousands of people on May 14, 2006 in a
spontaneous occupation of the streets that marked the start of an original,
creative and innovative form of mobilisation. It reached people who felt that
the demonstration was aimed at their own life experiences, and brought them
together in an unprecedented, joyful, communal meeting and protest space – a
space denied in everyday life.

At first
there were sit-ins demanding the right to housing (organised simultaneously in
over 20 cities), followed by large festive-playful mass demonstrations and the
creation of original specific communicative images. The housing superhero
“Supervivienda”[12],
for example, is a fictional character who satirises reality and who everyone
can identify with: survival in the precarious jungle. Supervivienda lays claim
to a collective right as a defense against the precarisation of life (by taking
the problem of individualised housing and giving it a new meaning). The
character has allowed a great deal of experimentation at the level of symbolic
production, as well as creating a shared imaginary through a myth-making
process.

This power
to create shared imagery and subjectivation, and its connection to a real,
commonplace and massive problem, has forced political powers to position
themselves and take steps that don't necessarily support the rights, but bring
the discussion out into the open: the new Spain-wide housing Law, the National
Housing Plan and a new law in Catalonia that includes measures that don’t go
all the way, but are interesting in terms of new opportunities for struggle
that bring it down to the level of everyday life.

Given that
this mobilisation greatly exceeded the usual organisation of social movements,
what can mechanisms like the ODSs, which try to organise themselves beyond
these spontaneous moments, contribute? They can respect and encourage the
totally heterogeneous composition of these mobilisations, share militant
knowledge that may be useful to them, listen to the demands arising from
circuits beyond the traditional ones (not assemblies, but blogs, for example[13]),
be open to their paradoxes and not destroy them, and nourish creativity and
communicative forms that are produced within them - these are all challenges
involved in the process of accompanying and building any fight or claim for the
right to housing in the heat of these mobilisations that can try to sustain
them beyond one-off moments..

2.3.
First faltering steps towards new class institutions and policies against precarisation

For years
now, some (post)autonomous movements have been trying to shape a commonbecoming
for precarious locals and migrants[14].
Honing and updating the tools for militant research and for mapping[15]
subjective emergences of the social. With a desire to find rebels and
rebellions at the heart of migratory processes in the new urban cultures. A
desire to learn from other politicisations. A desire to mix together, and use
the forms that survive metropolitan flexploitation to build new concepts and structures.
A desire to build new war machines. Through our investigations we try to create
experimental prototypes of a nomadic, monstrous union. A biopolitical union[16],
a new social

syndicalism[17]
or biosyndicalism[18],
a weapon that can be embodied by the new constellations of living labour.

Any
hypothesis of a social or biopolitical union has to act in today's framework of
labour market flexibilisation, ongoing rotation and the proliferation of new
forms of hiring - employees who are "in transit", intermittent,
precarious and fighting against a form of dominance: instability. A
work-related instability that has it’s correlate outside of work: social
dispersion.

This
subjective reconstruction of a biopolitics of class - of a major focus of
subjectivation that works against the precarisation and attacks social
dispersion, the massmediatisation of subjectivity and the current powers
of control, must take into account several fundamental aspects and directions:

a) The
stratification of the new class structure linked to metropolitan exploitation.
The two principal social sectors that are currently on the lowest rungs of the
hierarchy of citizenship (income and rights at a European level) are, on one
hand, the new working poor or metropolitan proletariats (servoproletariado
metropolitano)[19],who
are mainly migrants (with and without legal residency papers) and women (who
are both invisible and exploited), and on the other, local precarious men and
women who survive by trying to elude precarised cognitive work, which is
undervalued, codified and underpaid.

b) It’s
important to make the most of the powers and the virtualities of this technical
and subjective machinery made up of productive lives and critical-creative
minorities, who are bearers of a new vocational and autonomous
self-entrepreneurship, and forms of life that exist in parallel to the
biopower-workfare system. “It is necessary to produce new forms of action that
take advantage of this multiplicity. If the mass union constituted its power on
the basis of the growing heterogeneity of the lives of workers, biopolitical
syndicalism should find its force in the wealth of differences, in the capacity
to politically articulate contemporary heterogeneity”[20],
so that it becomes self-determining, and turns the power of mobility,
intermittency, communication and the autonomous cooperation of minds into
weapons for battle and aggregation.

(c) Social
or biopolitical syndicalism must leave behind the strict corporate separation
of existing syndicalism (without a priori refusing to intervene in
problematic union representation in companies) trying to attack smoothly and
intelligently inside and outside the workforce, understanding that producing
horizons of convergence (shared claims) for the multiple forms of precarious existence
is key to their transformative power.

(d) The
powerful forms of a new social syndicalism will arise from a pragmatic that
hasn't yet been invented. It will be partly constituted by the contact,
contagions and battles that are increasingly being played out at the heart of
the very processes that produce subjectivity, community, organisation and
mobilisation among migrant communities.

The new
social and/or biopolitical syndicalism, as a social trend, can’t rule out the
need to fight within existing wage-labour, it shouldn't stop trying to
re-update and re-subjectivise the existing union spaces that are prepared to
open up generously, contributing their valuable knowledge and resources.
“Organised precarious subjectivities” shouldn’t stop pressuring, crossing over
with migrant and precariased forms of labour and demanding that union
structures adapt to the subjects who need them today. This does not go against
thinking of the new institutions of social or biopolitical syndicalism such as
ODSs.

These hypothesis
are currently in the embryonic phase, and one of our principal commitments is
to compose these hybrid prototypes based on specific physical spaces (such as
the ODSs, second generation social centres, grassroots unions and communities
of those “affected” by specific situations) that have the power to attract,
accumulating knowledge, logistics and desires that catalyse the intersection
between this double becoming: biosyndicalist experimentation and new
recombinations between precarious locals and migrants.

This text is composed by
several voices; by necessity, very different experiences and contexts can be
heard in it. We write from Malaga, in southern Spain, Terrassa/Barcelona and
Madrid. This polyphony helps shape the article and its open nature. We want
this heterogeneity to be understood as part of the complex and experimental
nature of the practices that we discuss. We present fragments - broad strokes
that identify things that need to be questioned - but we don’t resolve them
through pre-existing formulas. We do, however, indicate shared needs: the need
to build new spaces capable of talking about (other) desires, and driving them
beyond the control of capital, the need to share and collectivise injustices
and violations that are experienced in solitude, and to produce subjectivities
that break away from fear, in particular the fear and the logic of the dictate
of individualism: “every man for himself”. In short, we share the search for
new places that can confront the increasing precarisation of our lives.

[4] For example, the slogan that
appears on the web site of the Patio Maravillas ODS is “Renta, casa y papeles
para todos” (“Income, housing and papers for all”). “Derecho a tener derechos”
(“The right to rights”) is another popular slogan.

[5] May it not be feminism’s job to pay
attention to the new opposition processes that emerge from social dispersion -
both individual and collective - rather than from organised movements?
Transnational carers, interns without papers, the super-precarious on casual
subcontracts, mothers without means, grandmothers without carers, women with
multiple working days.... Self-conscious organisations and individual responses:
How do we oppose all these forms-situations? How can we compose a kind of
feminism or feminisims that can express them, without stifling them?

[7] In the manifesto
for March 8, 2007 (Women’s Day), some women's groups in Madrid defined care as
follows: “Care-related work includes whole series of tasks aimed at providing
physical and emotional wellbeing to others, as well as caring for oneself.
Meeting these needs that we all share requires work that goes beyond physical
tasks such as cooking, laundry and cleaning. It includes an immaterial
dimension that is difficult to quantify and has to do with the emotions that
come into play in these relationships and that occur in everyday life:
communication, the production of sociability, emotional capacity, empathy. This
complexity associated with care makes it impossible to quantify, impossible to
reduce to a timetable, impossible to pigeonhole into set tasks, impossible to
point at and say: 'it starts here and it ends here'.On one hand, care work is
essential for the maintenance and sustainability of life, although
paradoxically it is kept invisible and undervalued".

[11] The message read: “Hello everybody.
I know this mail looks like many that circulate through the net, but it's not.
This e-mail is being sent throughout Spain to claim our rights. During March,
we’ve seen how “macrobotellones” (mass meetings of young people to drink
alcohol on the streets) were organised all over Spain. We want to join forces
for a different story. In France, young people are protesting against the
“modification” of“rubbish” contracts. Many have raised their voices to complain
that young people in this country don't do anything. Ok then, are we going to
show them? IN FAVOUR OF DECENT HOUSING, PASS IT ON!!”